


Survival

by sophiagratia



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Consent, F/F, Pre-Canon, Religion, Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:28:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the edges of their violent lives, they are teaching each other how to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survival

**Author's Note:**

> **Trigger warning** : past experience of sexual violence (not depicted), and redemption from that trauma, are central concerns in this story.
> 
> Kira is seventeen. Lupaza is somewhere closer to thirty. Elaborately consensual sex between them is a key element of this story. If that is a problem for you, do not read this.
> 
> My thanks to Kathryne and Chesari, valiant friends and early readers.

*

The night was too quiet. The canvas sighed in the wind, and the lamp glowed gold against it. These momentary illusions of peace, she thought, were the most terrifying thing about war. 

Nerys sat curled in a corner of Furel’s tent, making herself unobtrusive as she sorted through the miscellany that Tiran had brought back from his most recent ill-conceived raid. It wasn’t really necessary work, but tomorrow weighed on her mind, and she didn’t feel like sleep, and besides, Furel was singing. She’d make any excuse to listen to Furel sing. He didn’t do it often, and wouldn’t if he thought anyone but Nerys was listening. Even with her, he had to think she was occupied with something else before he’d open his throat and let his rich baritone carry the long verses of an old, old tune. This one was in Middle Rakanthan, and Nerys didn’t understand a word of it, but she could guess: love, war, and the prophets. That was all ancient Bajor ever sang about. She wondered, sometimes, if modern Bajor had even that much to make a song of.

She lifted a platinum earring to the lamplight, evaluating it. Cardassian, and a purposeless luxury. These trinkets, these meaningless things, seemed to mock her. For maybe the hundredth time in five years, Nerys was certain she was going to die in the morning. She never got less certain, no matter how many times it didn’t happen. She thumbed a bit of grit from the earring’s catch. Platinum wasn’t worth much, in a war zone. Maybe she could make rifle-sights of it, but better just give it to Fala to sell. If anyone would still be alive to profit by it. She set it aside. Furel’s voice dipped and rose. 

Here we go, she thought, pulling a fine long dagger from the crate. Digging a bit, she found its simple leather sheath. She tested the blade with a fingertip and, as a line of blood rose across her skin, bit off a yelp for fear of stopping Furel. His key had changed, mournfully minor. Whoever was at war or in love or both, they weren’t at all happy about it. Or maybe they were praying. She strapped the knife to her ankle, under her boot. 

The canvas rustled again, this time with intent. Lupaza emerged into the lamplight, wild and smiling. 

‘Furel, the rifle cache is secure, I’ve just got to – oh! Hey, little one.’ Furel stopped singing. Nerys leveled her gaze, blank as she could make it, on Lupaza for a moment, then bowed her head once more to her work. She’d liked to hear _little one_ , like that, in Lupaza’s voice, once. But it didn’t fit anymore. A lot didn’t fit anymore, not since –. Since. She shrugged off a chill and pretended to scrutinize a long string of beads. They might be for prayer. Did Cardassians pray? She listened for Lupaza to continue. 

‘Give us a minute, would you, little one? Furel and I have some things to discuss.’ Of course. She stood wordlessly, nodded at Furel, leveled another glare at Lupaza for good measure, and ducked out into the night. She thought she heard a gruff baritone chuckle following her. 

Furel’s lamp cast an unstable half-light a few paces beyond his tent. Nerys reached its edge, the edge of the Dakhur night, and paused. Her eyes flexed and flickered, adjusting. The breeze shifted. It carried Furel’s growling voice and Lupaza’s liquor-and-autumn-wind one. She knew better, but she crouched there in that penumbra and listened. It was the best way to know how afraid to be, to listen to them the night before an action. When Furel laughed like that, it meant the worst. She shuddered and folded her legs beneath her. 

‘One day you’ll have to stop treating her like a child, Lula.’ That growl, then Lupaza’s quiet laugh, dismissive.

‘Oh, stop. She’s all of – what, sixteen?’

‘Seventeen.’ Furel’s raised eyebrow nearly audible. A low whistle from Lupaza. Sarcastic. Nerys dug a booted toe into the dirt.

‘Much the same. You can’t tell me I’m wrong to want to protect her. Remember her first fight? And then she damn near ripped the head off that gul’s son last month. She’s hardly changed. Just a girl – angry, fierce, but just a girl.’ A sound that might have been Furel slapping his knees – tired exasperation, unless Nerys missed her guess. She bowed her head. She shouldn’t have been listening.

‘Five years of war, Lula. You know what that means, and better than most. Don’t look at me like that – obtuse doesn’t suit you.’ Rustling and footsteps, her laughter and his irritated grunt. She’d tried a cajoling jig, maybe. Nerys flushed with rage at her and a strange shameful kind of affection for him. ‘Stop it, Lu. ’S not a kid anymore’s all I’m saying, and you’ve got to stop treating her like she is. She’s seen too much. Deserves better, from all of us.’ A longer pause. 

‘All right.’ Pause. ‘All right.’ 

Then it was all arms inventories and needless tactical detail. Nerys stopped listening. She’d learned all she needed to know. They would all die in the morning, and she just a girl in Lupaza’s eyes. There was nothing more to gain from eavesdropping. She bit her thumb and dug her toe into the dirt.

*

Lupaza smiled, raking her hair from her neck and binding it into an idle braid. Closed her eyes and shrugged into the warmth of the heating unit at her back. She mistrusted the night. Too quiet. But quiet was getting harder to come by, and a moment’s solitude was a precious thing. 

The thought of those rifles put her feet back in motion quick enough. Inventory; field tests; power cell upgrades. She’d need to assign one of the new recruits. Train him to repair as well as to shoot. Better fixing than killing. She wrapped her shawl close around her shoulders. At least mechanics was a skill that looked something like real life. 

She nearly tripped over the figure at the edge of the light. Straight-backed and cross-legged and still as stone. A mess of brushfire hair gone monochrome in the dark. Nerys. 

Shit. 

‘Hey,’ softly, fingertips brushing her shoulder. Nerys turned to look up at her, impassive but for her silk-and-dagger eyes. Furel was right. There was hardly a shadow of childhood in this young woman. How had she missed that? But never mind – it was, evidently, high time she caught up. She dropped one knee to the dirt. ‘You overheard us.’ 

Nerys cocked her head and her eyes flashed. ‘Yes.’ Shit. Well, inventory could wait.

Lupaza offered her hand. ‘Walk with me?’ Nerys recoiled like an offended hara-cat. Lupaza waited, steady hand extended. 

‘Rys. I hurt you and I’m sorry. And I want to take a walk with you. It’s cool and clear and it’s quiet and we won’t get a chance again soon, what with tomorrow. What say?’ 

Nerys narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips and tried to look fierce. She did look fierce. Angular, dangerous. She had changed, and Lupaza regretted not having noticed. But she took her hand, and that was a start. 

By daylight, the burnt-iron dirt would match Nerys’s hair and the hills would stand out stark against the sky. By night, the hills hid the moons and they planted their feet by instinct. They walked a long way out, out and up, in silence. Habit and training and this mutual life synced their silent steps, opened their wary ears for signs of what they could not see. 

They crested a ridge. The scatterplot of campfires far below; the pinprick stars straining to shine past the mirror crescents of Endalla and Derna. Sisters, they were called, little Endalla’s orbit following close on Derna’s, in a trick of parallax seeming to catch up and then lose ground, a girlish cycle. With the quickest pressure of fingertips, Nerys released Lupaza’s hand. 

She scrambled to the flat top of the vast red rock that Fala called the Bed of the Prophets, sank down on its smooth surface, resumed her earlier pose. Her dusty hands; her earth-colored clothes; her Dakhur-dirt hair. The moonlight blended her with the rock, and Lupaza thought: as it should be. She wondered if Nerys knew that she could be seen, mornings, from the camp. Cross-legged on the rock, her wrists open to the sky. She wondered if Nerys knew that they all watched her pray at dawn and that it gave them hope. 

Lupaza scrambled after her, with considerably less agile grace. 

You would never know to look at her in the middle of a firefight that Nerys could sit still, this way. Lupaza smiled to herself as she lowered herself to the warm rock, her shoulder brushing her friend’s. Nerys in a raid – bright and constant-moving as her namesake _neral-rhys_ , sky-fire, meteorite – bright, constant-moving, and deadly. And Nerys now, hands on her knees, wrists turned down, safeguarding prayers until morning, blended with the rock. Dakhur through and through, this girl, Lupaza thought. The Dakhur she fought for and the Dakhur she resembled. 

‘Furel was right,’ Lupaza said at length. The night was so quiet. The quiet and a cool breeze sent a shiver up her arms. Or so she told herself. ‘Furel was right. That’s all I really know how to say.’ Statue-still, eyes hard, Nerys lent her silence to the night’s. ‘Rys. Look at me.’ Like a whip, she turned. 

Whatever retort had come to her lips, it died there. Nerys let out a long breath and all the stiffness went out of her. ‘Forget it, Lupaza.’ She shook her head when Lupaza reached for her shoulder. ‘Really. It’s okay.’ She turned away again, and a long pause followed. ‘Lupaza,’ almost a whisper, ‘it’s just that this never gets any easier.’ 

Lupaza waited. 

‘This –  _this_.’ Nerys gestured, then stopped, holding her hand open before her, staring at her dust-creased palm. ‘It just never stops.’ She stared at her palm, as though astonished by it. Lupaza waited, watching her in the moonlight. There was much in their lives that never stopped, much that ‘this’ could mean. 

‘I know,’ Lupaza said, because it seemed simple and might be true. 

‘What Furel said. My first fight. You weren’t wrong. I needed you.’ Nerys shook her head as though emerging from some deeply-guarded thought, and scrubbed her palm on her knee. She turned her frank gaze on Lupaza. ‘I still need you.’ 

Lupaza doubted that Kira Nerys had ever acknowledged to anyone that she needed anything. ‘I know,’ she said again, which seemed too simple and not true. Nerys’s eyes narrowed, her fingers flexed, as though to say how little Lupaza knew. 

‘But I need you for me, now,’ she said, ‘me as I am, not some idea of me. What Furel said. I’m not a kid, I’ve been doing this for five years and – and it’s been so, I mean, so much has changed and yet so much _never_ changes, so much is so much worse than I thought it could be in ways I never – I mean.’ She took a deep breath, blinked hard as though trying to clear her thoughts by force. ‘The point is that it’s been five years and I’m a different person, I’m seventeen and still alive, for one, and _that’s_ a fucking miracle. But this, all this, raids and shooting and – and all these – _awful_ things that, that no one ever talks about, it doesn’t change.’ Her voice broke; she paused, her deep breath more ragged this time. ‘And I need – I need you to be something that’s better than –’ that abortive gesture again ‘– better than thinking I’m giving my life to... _this_ and nothing more than this.’ That anger, that conviction, that rush of speech – it was more than she’d spoken at once in a long while.

Lupaza lay her hand over Nerys’s, stroked her thumb across her knuckles. She fixed her eyes on the dimly starry space between Endalla’s crescent horns and Derna’s. 

‘I don’t know if I can give you that, Nerys,’ she said. Carefully. She sensed as she never had before that Nerys was hiding something – some difficult and fragile thing that she could not know about, and that she did not want to break.

‘You can, you have. I just need to know that – I don’t know, that you know me, that you care for me.’ That seemed too easy. 

‘Of course I care for you, Nerys – I’m sorry if I’ve been bad at showing you, bad at paying enough attention to let you know that, but how could you think I don’t – ?’ It occurred to her, suddenly, to be angry. ‘Surely you care enough for _me_ , trust me enough to see that?’

‘No. I mean, yes. Of course I do. Of course. But that’s not, I mean. I – I feel so strongly for you, Lupaza. You must know that? But also – prophets, why is this so hard to say?’ She scrubbed the heel of her hand across her mouth, paused. Dropped her hands into her lap. Looked right into Lupaza’s eyes. ‘I care about you, yes. But there’s something else, something different. I – want you.’ Lupaza stared. ‘And I want you to want me, too. Or, but that’s not right, either, it’s – it’s so hard to say, what I want, why, what I’m – _prophets_ , Lu, say something.’ 

‘Nerys...’ Lupaza pulled her hand back, folded her arms across her knees. She cleared her throat. She schooled her tone. ‘Believe me when I say that I feel strongly for you, too. All we’ve been through together, how could I not?’ Nerys bowed her head, scrubbed the heel of her hand across her cheek, uncomfortable. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Rys. You’re special; you’re like – well,’ she couldn’t help chuckling, ‘you’re not like anything at all, and that’s the point, isn’t it? But – please understand – you and I, we don’t – oh, shit, Nerys, I don’t know how to say this. You and I –’ Nerys’s headshake was so determined, so abrupt, that it stopped her cold. And that was something of a relief. 

‘I don’t want anything like that. I’m not saying I’m in love with you or something, I’m not asking for anything like that.’ That liquid intensity in her eyes, that resolve in her jaw. Conviction, and that difficult, fragile thing. Her voice was clear and forceful when she resumed. ‘But I want you to be my first.’ 

Lupaza had to stop herself rolling her eyes. The way the young recruits carried on, she’d have trouble believing any one of them a virgin. ‘Your first what? Woman?’

‘Lover.’ 

‘You’ve never?’ 

‘No.’ Nerys shrugged. Her eyes, fretful, skittered from the ground to Lupaza and back again. ‘Not so it was good, anyway. Not so I wanted it.’

By the prophets.

Lupaza bit her knuckle, cutting off a curse. Her little Rys. By the prophets. She brushed a thumb across Nerys’s cheekbone. 

‘When?’ An eyeroll, a gestural nod. Some time ago; does it matter? ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ A shrug. We live lives of violence; does it matter? ‘Cardis, or one of ours?’ Nerys flinched. But she left Lupaza’s hand where it lay on her shoulder.

‘Ours.’ Not that it mattered. The reptiles might be crueller, but the betrayal of a fellow Bajoran... ‘Two. Of ours.’ 

By the prophets and the end of days. ‘Nerys... Oh, Nerys.’ She tried to draw the girl into her arms, but Nerys stopped her short, gripping her wrist tight in one hand. 

‘No, Lupaza. No – I don’t – that’s not the point.’ Her eyes so frank, so open. And hard as the rock they sat on. How did you get to be like that, at seventeen? — Such a stupid question. Lupaza knew exactly how. Here it was in front of her.

‘Tell me, then.’ 

Nerys’s answer was a kiss. Lips soft on Lupaza’s cracked ones, a hand firm on her jaw. With all her habitual intensity, she ran her tongue swiftly across Lupaza’s upper lip, drew it between her teeth, kissed her softly once more, and pulled back. 

And then she smiled. Small and quiet, but bright as anything. A smile Lupaza hadn’t seen in – how long? How long had it been, since Kira Nerys had smiled like that? Another stupid question. At least since she’d been carrying this difficult, this fragile, this terrible thing that it had not occurred to Lupaza to notice. 

Lupaza stared at her, incredulous, then shook her head, laughing low. She fanned her fingertips through the mess of Nerys’s hair, ran her thumb along her earring-chain. The chain Lupaza had forged herself and clipped to a girl’s ear five long years gone.

Nerys turned, closing her eyes, and pressed her lips to Lupaza’s palm. ‘That’s why I want it to be you.’ A kiss, a nip at her thumb, breath warm on her skin. ‘I want to know what it’s like to be touched... carefully. By someone – someone who’s really _with_ me. I want – I just want to know. Before –.’ 

Before it’s too late. She lay her thumb across Nerys’s lips. The odds were good they’d all be dead or worse by sundown tomorrow. And Nerys was young enough, still, that she knew what that was worth. No matter the monotony of all of this, violence and the prospect of death still meant something to her. 

With one light fingertip, Lupaza traced her lips, her nose, her brow. ‘Oh, my Rys,’ she whispered. ‘My fierce, brave Rys. You’re heartbreaking, you know that?’ And Nerys smiled again. 

Then the sky burned and the air screamed: Lupaza’s head and Nerys’s whipped around as one to the source of the blast. Cardassian. Ground-launched. Ten, twelve klicks north. Another blast, and Nerys on her feet, pistol raised as the glare set her hair ablaze against the night. 

_Skyfire_. 

Lupaza fired her phaser into the air three times in quick succession; paused; twice more. If the prophets were kind, Furel would have heard the rockets, would be waiting for the signal. 

They leapt together from the rock to the dusty earth. Before Nerys could take off skidding downhill through the brush, Lupaza caught her wrist and yanked her into an embrace and a kiss. Pressing her cheek hard against Nerys’s, one fist curled in the fabric of her shirt, the other in her hair, she spoke quickly. 

‘I need you to run – _run_ , as fast as you can – back to Tennik’s camp; they won’t have seen the blasts; we need them up the western ridge. If they object tell them the order comes from Shakaar himself. Take position under Merrin’s Head, scatter your lifesigns, and wait for my one-and-three. Move quickly.’ Nerys nodded and would have turned to run if not for Lupaza’s tight grip. ‘Nerys.’ She kissed her once more, hard and fast. ‘Don’t you dare die tonight. I want my chance to be your first.’ Nerys trotted backward, pistol ready at her shoulder. Grinning.

‘You’ll get it – I promise you that.’ She turned and disappeared, quick and whisper-quiet on the sliding hillside rocks.

*

The stone was cold beneath her back. She scuffed her feet in the dirt of the ridge below her. Razhal’s deft fingers tapped the rock next to her, transforming nerves into a clever rhythm.

‘Stop that,’ Nerys hissed in spite of herself. Razhal squeezed her hand. 

‘Just a little longer, Rys.’ 

They lay side by side, she and the Tennik crew, against the rock along the ridge. Waiting. If Nerys had known that the romance of resistance was really a whole lot of desperately uncomfortable waiting, she might have stayed in the camp with her father and brothers. She fingered the handle of her new dagger, clipped it in and out of its sheath. Razhal ran a thumb along her forearm. 

Tennik and Kerrin were chuckling, low, further along, and she thought Petra was singing. Or maybe praying. Petra and her lovely, dusty voice. She turned her head and found Razhal’s huge eyes dark and silent and patient. She winked. Nerys flinched. 

‘Razhal. Don’t let them take me.’ She said it every time. Usually to Lupaza, but always to someone. Tonight – this morning; the sun was rising – it was Razhal. 

‘I don’t know that anyone could capture you if they wanted to.’ Nerys gripped her hand hard. 

‘I’m serious. Please, don’t let them take me. You see me captured, you shoot me and you aim to kill, okay? I’m serious.’ She pictured the dark interior of the imaginary Cardi camp that haunted her, pictured the slimy guards and the arrogant Gul, the feeling of rough, cold hands on her body, and shuddered. She would rather die. She was sure of that.

‘No, Nerys.’ Razhal kissed their joined knuckles. ‘Your mission is to survive at all costs. That is why we are here. To survive.’ Survival. It was becoming less clear every day why, or how, or what it meant. 

She thought of Lupaza, her skin moon-glowing and her hair wild, smiling on the Bed of the Prophets. Survival. Lupaza. Survival. 

‘Maybe. I –’ she cut herself short as a phaser blast cut the silence. One, and then three. Lupaza. 

‘Move!’ came Tennik’s strong young voice from down the line. 

* 

_The day is ours_. 

A fool’s bravura. Nothing, Lupaza thought, was hers today. Nothing but a raging phaser-burn across her back and an empty ache where Shakaar felt victory should ride in her heart. He spoke as though he had lost nothing. He spoke as though he did not know these men and women and had not seen them die. 

She saw the blast again in her mind, and again. Saw the ridge aflame, heard the delayed roar. Those to whom this day belonged were dead.

She spoke their names aloud as she cast prayerstones for each of them across the surface of the Bed of the Prophets. 

‘Tennik. Kerrin.’ They had been boys, hadn’t they? Just yesterday, boys entwined together in the morning, by a fire; now dead men, their bodies scattered. ‘Petra, Vell, Ilara.’ Sisters and their chatter in the evenings; sisters and their riotous voices full of love. ‘Ruta. Tes.’ Recruited only last month. She had had to ask Furel their names. ‘Razhal.’ Razhal and her fine hands; Razhal’s fine clavier-playing hands, in ruins. 

She cast her stones. The prophets were silent on the question of death. She prayed for an afterlife for Razhal and her hands. 

And Nerys. And Nerys. 

‘Nerys.’ She cast one stone, and then another. ‘Nerys.’ The burnt-iron Dakhur stones. ‘Nerys.’ Her little hara-cat, her Rys, her skyfire girl who wanted to be touched for love. 

Nerys, who prayed at dawn. Lupaza crossed her legs beneath her and lay her wrists on her knees. She had no duranja – she had not so much as seen a duranja since she was a child – so she focused her prayer on the sinking sun, the sun that warmed her face as it warmed the face of Bajor and the red dirt hills that held the dead bodies of her comrades and that so resembled Nerys. 

She prayed for Bajor and for Dakhur and for all the many dead and for their lives to come. She prayed for her broken self. Above all, she prayed for Nerys. 

At the whisper of boots on rock behind her, she wheeled with her phaser in her hand.

‘Not every day you hear your own name in a prayer for the dead.’ 

She lowered her arm and stared. 

‘By the prophets, Nerys.’ She surprised herself with a chuckle. ‘I just do not know what to do with you.’ And bright, miraculous, Nerys smiled. 

Framed against the sky, miraculously alive, miraculously smiling. The sun, setting, burnished her. Nerys. Nerys. Nerys. 

Lupaza rose and gathered her in her arms, gingerly at first and then fiercely, when Nerys fisted her hands in the fabric of her shawl and pressed her face into her shoulder. 

‘Nerys,’ she said. Again and again, ‘Nerys, Nerys,’ a new prayer for the new night. She pulled back, holding Nerys at arm’s length. Her cheek scuffed with dirt, her hair a tangle, a rough scrape across one eyebrow, but whole and miraculous. Relief overtook her and she began to laugh, ragged at first and then full, open throated. Nerys smiled. Nerys smiled, and pressed Lupaza’s palm to her lips. Her smile faded.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nerys breathed against her skin. 

‘No, no – why –’

‘They were coming up the ridge. We had to blow it, make them think – and you must have thought – I’m sorry. It was so close, Lupaza. It was so damned close.’ Lupaza swallowed hard, brushing Nerys’s cheek as though that would make her question gentler. 

‘Casualties?’ 

‘Petra made sure everyone got out. Just barely, _prophets_ , it was so close.’ She shook her head. ‘Burns, mostly. Regenerators took care of most of the worst. Tennik’s still unconscious, and Razhal will never play her clavier again, but we’re all breathing.’ 

‘We should go. You have to tell Shakaar, Furel – ’ Nerys waved her off. 

‘I’ve just come from there. Shakaar – well, never mind.’ A ghost of her former smile returned. ‘You should have seen Furel’s face, though, when he saw me. But he said you were injured.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘He said you’d say that.’ Her lips twitched at their corners. ‘He also said not to let you, ah, get away with any nonsense. ...That’s a paraphrase.’ 

‘I’ll bet it is. And?’

‘You’re not going to like this.’ Nerys unslung her kit belt and knelt on the rock. ‘I had to leave the tech with Petra. She –’ her voice caught. ‘She still thinks she can save Razhal’s hands. But I – sorry. No, it’s okay. Really. Furel gave me bandages. And he was out of antiseptic, so – he told me to use some of Tiran’s rotgut.’ She held up a steel flask. Lupaza winced. 

‘I think it can wait, Nerys, I –’

‘No. It can’t. Sit.’ She obeyed. She felt Nerys approach behind her, Nerys’s steady hands brushing down her ribcage to lift the hem of her shirt, slide it slowly, gently up and across her seared skin. She flinched, tried and failed to hold back a grunt. ‘Sorry,’ Nerys’s voice low, hand on her shoulder. 

‘It’s okay.’ She tugged her bloodied shirt over her head, and her hair fell down across her bare shoulders. Soft and careful, Nerys’s fingers brushed it to one side. 

‘Steady now.’ The sharp metallic noise of the flask’s stopper unscrewing, Nerys’s deep breath. Nerys’s hand on her shoulder, careful and strong. Lupaza balled her shirt in her fists and pressed it to her face. Then bit down hard into the fabric and keened with the roaring fire that erupted in her every nerve-ending as Nerys emptied the alcohol across her back.

‘Shh, it’s okay, that was the worst part, the worst is over, shh, it’s okay.’ She’d lost a few seconds to the pain. Now Nerys was leaning close, both hands on her shoulders, cheek pressed to her temple, murmuring reassurances. Lupaza blinked away a film of tears and gasped. 

‘Yeah. It’s okay. It’s okay. Go ahead.’ She braced herself for new pain, but what she felt was Nerys’s lips at the base of her neck, her palms pressing her tensed shoulders down. Then Nerys’s quick fingers, pressing the bandage in place, the firm pressure of her fingertips pressing a line of eye-misting, echoing pain across her skin, smoothing the tape. Then only Nerys’s palms, firm and gentle on her shoulders. A kiss on the crown of her head. 

‘There. Done.’ Lupaza closed her eyes. It took her a long moment to locate what it was she felt, shirtless there on the Bed of the Prophets with Nerys’s hands on her shoulders and Nerys’s lips on her hair – a long moment before she recognized that feeling as safety. 

She turned. Backlit by the red burn of the day’s last light, a muted study in shades of Dakhur dust, there was Nerys. Nerys with that question in her eyes; Nerys who grew bashful under her gaze and set to packing up her makeshift medkit.

‘Rys.’ She reached for her, tugged her hand, until Nerys moved to sit beside her. Lupaza pressed a kiss to her lips. ‘Thank you.’ Nerys nodded. Her former reassuring humor had gone. ‘Come here.’ She hadn’t expected the constriction in her throat that dropped her voice to a ragged whisper. Nerys looked at her for a long moment, as though deciding on a question she didn’t know how to ask. 

Then she moved. Feline-lithe, she shifted into Lupaza’s lap, straddling her thighs, knees pressing against her hips. Lupaza felt suddenly exposed, in the settling cool of evening, suddenly too conscious of her bare belly and breasts, of the clear burn of the day’s violence and the afternoon’s doubt, and of the strange fact of Nerys, here, so close. 

But Nerys only looked at her. A long still pause. Then she crossed her wrists at her waist, curled her fingers around the hem of her shirt, and pulled it over her head. She shook out her hair, balled the coarse linen in her hands, discarded it with a blunt wrist-flick. There was something defiant in the set of her shoulders. 

From one to the other, in a long arc, ran a thin, ragged scar. 

Lupaza pressed the tip of her finger to one end of the scar, looking her question at Nerys, who bit her lip and nodded, eyes steady on hers. She traced the length of the scar, drawing a sharp breath from Nerys, who gave another nod: _Yes, that’s good, yes._

Nerys, for her part, locked her eyes on Lupaza’s and fought the urge to flinch. It was too good, to be touched like this, to be touched there and feel safe. ‘One of them had a knife,’ was all she said. 

Lupaza kissed each end of the scar, Nerys’s skin warm under her lips. Nerys shifted in her lap. ‘Are you going to keep it?’ It was something they talked about. Idle dreams of the after-the-occupation they never quite dared hope for. Whether they’d keep their scars, when Bajor might have medical resources enough to erase them all forever.

‘If you keep doing that?’ She shivered as Lupaza tongued the tender center of the scar, just above her sternum. ‘Yes – almost certainly yes.’ Lupaza laughed against her skin. Yes, she thought. She would keep the scar. It would hold Lupaza’s laughter for her. 

Lupaza wrapped her arms around Nerys’s too-slender waist, lips still pressed to the hollow of her throat. She ran her hands the length of Nerys’s back, pressing her close, as though if she held her fast, she might protect her entirely from all the ill the world might try to do her. 

‘Lupaza,’ Nerys whispered, cupping her chin in both her hands. She kissed her once, and then again. She took her hands in hers, and stood, drawing her up. She placed Lupaza’s hands on the waistband of her trousers and smiled against her cheek. ‘Lupaza.’ Lupaza’s answering murmur encouraged her. She bent to pull her dagger from her boot, and tossed it aside. She kicked and stumbled, freeing her feet. Lupaza smiled. Together, their hands fumbled at catches and buttons, and Nerys shook her hips until her trousers pooled at her feet. Stepping out of them, she slid her hands down Lupaza’s thighs, dropping to kneel at her feet, kissing breastbone and belly and hip. Lupaza laughed, winding her fingers in Nerys’s hair, and Nerys smiled up at her, tugging her down to sit once more on the flat rock, still warm with the ceaseless sun of the day.

Nerys. Naked like that, the long scar across her clavicle bright in the not-quite-light, her hair falling wild as the rest of her over her shoulders, brushing her breasts, Nerys, with her unaccustomed sheepish smile. Lupaza kissed her, and drew her into her arms. ‘I want to touch you.’ 

‘Really?’ 

Lupaza laughed. ‘Yes.’

Nerys drew Lupaza’s hands across her hips, where they felt natural and right. She placed her palms, carefully, on Lupaza’s shoulders, feeling the weathered skin and muscle there. ‘I want that, too.’ She kissed her again. And again. 

Uncannily, Lupaza saw before her at once the girl of five years ago, and the young woman of now, here, in her arms. She could not be sure how they had come to be here, together, like this, but whatever it was that had brought them here, she knew that she was glad of it. Kissing Nerys’s sweet, warm lips, she ran her hands up along her narrow waist, across her ribs, to cup her breasts. ‘Yes?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. Lupaza’s thumbs across her nipples, Lupaza’s lips on hers, on her jaw, her throat, her shoulders. Her heart raced. Lupaza’s hand on her hip. She arched and sighed. Lupaza’s knuckles across her belly drawing out a laughing gasp. ‘Yes.’ Then Lupaza’s hand, cautious, slow, winding carefully down between her legs. Her heart raced. She swallowed hard. She kissed Lupaza’s brow. She wrapped her arms around Lupaza’s neck and nodded. ‘Yes.’

Lupaza held Nerys’s gaze, one arm wrapped loosely around her, supporting her. Slowly, carefully, she drew one finger along Nerys’s cunt, pausing with pressure on her clit. She found her wet, and sighed with the want she felt at that. She sketched slow circles with her fingertip. Nerys drew a sharp voiced breath, high-pitched – ‘Yes.’ She moved slowly at first, and then, as Nerys began to move with her, faster. She lost herself to that, for a while. Nerys, moving like that in her arms, Nerys and her short breath punctuated with kisses, Nerys, Nerys, Nerys.

‘I – Lupaza.’ Nerys bit her lip, squeezed her eyes shut, moving carefully. Lupaza’s lips, soft on her brow, and Lupaza’s low murmured question in her ear – ‘Rys?’ – and she breathed deep and said, ‘I want, I – inside, I want your fingers, inside.’ It was so hard to say. Her heart raced; she thought she might cry and prayed she wouldn’t, not here, not now. It was so damned hard, but it felt so good and she couldn’t let it stop, not now. 

Lupaza slowed her hand and kissed, softly, Nerys’s parted lips. ‘Are you sure?’ Nerys’s nod was tense. 

‘Yes.’ She wasn’t, not really. But there in Lupaza’s arms, Lupaza’s protective hand cupping her cunt, _yes_ was the only answer she had, the only possible answer, the only answer she wanted. So she just kept saying it. ‘Yes.’ Lupaza’s fingertips sliding across her skin. ‘Yes.’ The shock of Lupaza’s fingertips pressing at her entrance. ‘Yes.’ The more she said it, the more she believed, the more she wanted. ‘Yes.’ She gasped, gripped Lupaza’s hair hard, pressed her lips hard to Lupaza’s, as Lupaza pressed one finger slowly, slowly inside. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ It felt so good. Lupaza. So good, so safe, and so difficult. Lupaza. ‘Yes.’

Heart pounding, almost afraid, Lupaza wrapped her arm all the way around Nerys’s back, hand firm on her ribcage, holding her close. ‘Rys,’ she whispered, ‘My Rys.’ She moved slowly, stretching and curling her finger inside, heart pounding as she felt Nerys grow warmer, wetter. The way Nerys moved, slowly, against her, kept whispering, ‘Yes,’ her own arousal, the depth of her desire to do anything, anything at all that would make Nerys feel safe and wanted, the desperate possibility of failing her, of hurting her – it was almost terrifying, almost too much.

‘Yes,’ Nerys whispered, as Lupaza pressed a second finger, questioning, against her skin. ‘Yes,’ as two fingers stretched and curled inside her. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, suddenly remembering what she did not want to, suddenly remembering ‘No’ and her struggle and the blade across her skin. ‘ _Yes_ ,’ she whispered, determined, suddenly angry. She fought it, set her teeth and growled, ‘ _Yes_ ’ against it, but still that old paralysis took her over.

‘ _Wait_. Stop. Wait.’ Lupaza stopped. Carefully, she moved to extract her hand from between Nerys’s trembling-tense thighs. ‘No, stay – stay. It feels good. Just. Wait.’ Forehead resting against hers, eyes closed, Nerys breathed slowly, steadying herself. Lupaza watched, and waited, and kissed her cheek, and tried hard not to betray her fear. ‘What do you need from me, Rys?’ That uncanny feeling of loss and presence, all at once. 

‘Just, um. Slow down. Just slowly. And – talk to me, maybe.’ She blinked hard, willing herself into this moment, this moment alone, _this_ , here, Lupaza and the warm night breeze and only this, now.

‘What should I say?’ She tried and failed to keep her voice even.

‘Anything. Whatever you think of. Just – I want to hear your voice.’ She wound her fingers in Lupaza’s hair, kissed Lupaza’s forehead. ‘Is that okay?’ Lupaza’s lips at the base of her throat were one answer, the slow, slow stretch and curl of Lupaza’s fingers inside her another. 

‘Nerys. _Neral-rhys_ ,’ she whispered, steadying her voice, drawing out the syllables, dwelling on _r_ , on the rolling play of the first and the guttural drop of the second. ‘Nerys. Nerys.’ Lupaza fixed all her attention on this moment so slow it felt still. On the long rhythm of Nerys’s hips in her lap. The successive shudders of Nerys’s careful, sharp-focused breathing. She began to speak, without thinking, an ancient chant of prophecy. The words were old, the ancient Rakanthan dialect she and Furel used to send coded messages. The Cardassians seemed to think a language of prayer and poetry not worth decoding, seemed to think prayer and poetry no threat. She spoke the old words as Nerys rocked in her arms, spoke of the sun and the stars and the prophets; her fingers moving slowly, slowly, she drew out the deep r-sounds of the ancient language her mother had taught her. _Neral-rhys_ , the skyfire of the late prophetic books. Presages of a new age that had never come. But it might, yet. It might. ‘Nerys, _neral-rhys_ , Nerys,’ she chanted.

Lupaza’s low voice, Lupaza’s chanting rhythm, the not-quite-melody of the ancient words in Lupaza’s low chanting voice. Lupaza’s fingers, slow and intent. The heel of Lupaza’s hand. Lupaza’s lips moving against her cheek. These words she did not know, punctuated by the ancient form of her name. Lupaza. These ancient words. Survival. Lupaza. She rocked her hips. ‘Lupaza,’ she whispered, and then again, and again. 

She chanted, low and even, and let Nerys set her tempo. Slow, careful, determined, at first. And then faster. Nerys whimpered, high and faltering, against her ear, and for a moment she was frightened again. But Nerys’s hips jerked and moved faster, and Lupaza moved with her. Her chant fell from her throat. ‘Rys,’ she said, over and over, ‘Rys, my Rys, oh, _Rys_.’ 

Something clenched and twisted; she clutched Lupaza to her; she cried out, once, loud and wordless. Lupaza arched against her, with a cry of her own. Her muscles clenched; her breath caught; she slumped in Lupaza’s arms.

She hadn’t expected that. She flattened her hand, protective, across Nerys’s still-contracting cunt. She hadn’t expected that at all. ‘Shh,’ she whispered, all she could muster, ‘My Rys, shh, you’re safe,’ she whispered, hoping it was true. She wrapped her arms around Nerys, Nerys who was shaking in her embrace. ‘Shh, it’s okay.’ She breathed hard against the aftershock of her own unexpected orgasm, her own surprise. Nerys clutched her, shaking. Lupaza twitched her shawl out from under her, wrapped it around Nerys’s shoulders, and rocking gently, held her tight for a long while. 

Lupaza. The warmth of her. Her arms, this soft fabric. How raw this felt, how vulnerable, how safe. Lupaza. ‘Mmh,’ she tried. She pulled back, taking a deep breath, cradling Lupaza’s face in her hands. ‘Lupaza. Lupaza.’ She kissed her. ‘Thank you.’ 

Lupaza swallowed her relief and touched her nose to Nerys’s. ‘Thank you, little one.’ It was hard to know what she meant by that, but she knew that she meant it. 

It felt good, to hear _little one_ , like that, in Lupaza’s voice. Nerys disentangled herself, pulled Lupaza down with her to lie on the bare rock, and curled into her arms, close and warm. She thought, hazily, of Razhal, Razhal’s strong hand and her quiet voice, this morning. Maybe Petra had saved her hands, after all. Survival, she thought, closing her eyes. Lupaza. Survival. This closeness, this warmth. 

Lupaza kissed her hair and pulled the shawl around them both. Holding Nerys close, she raised her eyes to the sky. Derna was rising over the hilltop, and little Endalla close behind. She was catching up. 

*

The sun on her back called her into consciousness and she sighed as she stretched and cast off Lupaza’s shawl, stretching and sighing again and rolling over to let the rust-warm morning sunlight fall all over her skin. The Bed of the Prophets was cold and rough against her back, and she rolled her shoulderblades against it just to feel it. Lupaza still breathed heavily beside her, sprawled naked and gorgeous, her hair fanned across her shoulders, spilled across the rock.

Nerys propped herself on her elbow, watched Lupaza sleeping. She smiled and pulled the shawl across Lupaza’s nakedness, brushing her hair from her face. In a while, perhaps, Nerys would wake her with kisses. She had to hold back a laugh, thinking of that, thinking of how she would kiss her at throat and sternum and belly and hip. She wanted to know what she tasted like, what it would be like to kiss her there – and there, and there – and what Lupaza would do, what it would be like to please her, like that, and for Lupaza to let her know what it felt like. She wanted to know. She smiled. In a short while, she would know.

She stood and stretched and faced the valley and the rising sun. The breeze caught in her hair, and she arched into the feeling of it. A shiver, a pulse of pleasure, some echo of Lupaza kissing her throat and Lupaza moving inside her and Lupaza holding her through the night, this intense, shivering pleasure ran the whole length of her. She walked to the edge of the rock. 

And clear and clean and naked as the day, she crossed her legs beneath her, lay her wrists open on her knees, and began to pray.

*


End file.
